Greatness quotes
1.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside greatness — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Moderation is a fear of falling into that envy and contempt which those who grow giddy with their good fortune quite justly draw upon themselves. It is a vain boasting of the greatness of our mind."
"Great men should not have great faults."
"Greatness is one of the sensations of littleness"
"What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce. ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness - they cannot work and their civilization collapses."
"We never conceive the greatness of our fates."
"The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence."
"Doing great requires that we become great people, and all of us can become great people."
"The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives."
"What can be seeds of destruction can also be seeds of greatness."
"A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions."
"Anecdote: Greatness Means Leading the Way. No stream is large and copious of itself, but becomes great by receiving and leading on so many tributary streams. It is so, also, with all intellectual greatness, It is only a question of someone indicating the direction to be followed by so many affluent; not whether he was richly or poorly gifted originally."
"Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it that is great, that belongs to greatness."
"Whoever no longer finds greatness in God no longer finds it anywhere--he must either deny it or create it."
"The genius-in work and in deed-is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness."
"I know no other way to associate with great tasks than as play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition."
"There are people who are so presumptuous that they know no other way to praise a greatness that they publicly admire than by representing it as a preliminary stage and bridge leading to themselves."
"Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence."
"Faced with a world of "modern ideas" which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of "greatness," on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity."
"When a scholar of the old culture vows no longer to have anything to do with men who believe in progress, he is right. For the old culture has its greatness and goodness behind it, and an historical education forces one to admit that it can never again be fresh."
"He who possesses greatness is cruel towards his secondary virtues and considerations."
